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dragonlady7I don't know what's come over me but I can't remember how I ever managed to put up with my own life. I feel like I'm a different person this week—hell, month—dropped into a life I more or less can't make sense of. It's not unpleasant, but I honestly have no idea how I am meant to do my job. I muddle through, and when asked a question can always answer it, but regard the Sales part of the job with a perplexed sort of bemusement. I can perform tasks, but have no idea how to go about planning what tasks to perform. It's distinctly odd. And at home, I have no sense of routine, and everything must be done as if for the first time, with no sense of familiarity to help me choreograph my day or ensure that I don't leave out important things.
Getting back into skating may be alleviating my troubling grumpiness. Over the last couple of weeks I have been very short-tempered, impatient, easily frustrated and unable to cope with adversity. I think I partly rightly blamed not having a bedroom for this—it made me very upset not to have any space of my own, and it has a corrosive effect on my entire sense of well-being to have my house in such a shambles that I cannot reliably locate any of my possessions, even the ones I need every day. I have a bedroom now, and a dresser, and several boxes under the bed which I can use for the storage of clothing and possessions. Somehow this has calmed me, even though—you guessed it—said dresser is entirely empty, as are said boxes, and said possessions are in as much scattered disarray as ever. But I have a place for them, even if they're not in it.
But I think it's also that I'm regularly getting my ass kicked again. Skating to exhaustion is one thing—I've done a bit of that—but also just being there, interacting with the other girls, and especially the new girls with their enthusiasm and interest in the whole thing. It really does help to refocus one's energy.
Last night we did "fun" drills—Mia gave us relay races to do, an obstacle course, and an endurance skate in the wrong direction. I feel like I got stabbed in the kidney—the muscle on that side simply is not up to the task of raising my outside foot to do an inside crossover. It is strong the other direction, but not this one. And, as Mia intended, it leveled us—the veterans were as shaky on their crossovers as the newbies, without the ingrained advantage of muscle memory, and as many veterans as new girls had to shakily skate to the wall and try to stretch out cramping muscles that would not carry them in this unaccustomed motion.
And this morning, I rose on time, but instead of checking my email for 20 minutes, I went and did the dishes in the sink instead. Normally when I do dishes, I do so seething in annoyance over the fact that I am the only one who ever does dishes or in fact any housework. But somehow this morning, doing the dishes while Z lay in bed only pleased me, because when I was done, the sink was clean. So I made Z a lunch to take to work, and left slightly early for work. (Of course, traffic ate up my early start, but whatever.)
Things aren't bothering me today, even though I'm pretty sure this isn't my life and I'm only pretending it is so I really am not sure what I'm supposed to be doing at the moment—probably not updating LJ…
Am I addicted to exercise???
On another note, I'm considering, with complete seriousness, becoming an affiliate marketer for porn, to subsidize my terrible habit of not wanting to do work that involves leaving the house (since, as I'm seeing vividly played out everywhere, my writing habit, while it may result in publication, will never pay me well or reliably, given the current reprehensible state of the publishing industry, and I have become horribly addicted to eating).
My other idea is doing porn myself. I am increasingly enamored of the idea of doing a whole site of elaborately-staged, very authentic, fake-vintage porn. I need to become a much better seamstress and costumer, of course, but I think it would be great. I was looking at deltaofvenus.com the other day, which is a porn site ingeniously composed entirely of vintage erotica (1850-1960), and thinking that there is nothing new under the sun. The money shot? Well, before the Pill, coitus interruptus was just about the only way to avoid conception. It's not a visual thing at all, it's a practical thing that has become eroticized. And keeping one's shoes/socks on in porn despite being totally naked? Apparently this dates back to prehistory, as far as I can tell, though I still have no idea why it happens, save that nudity is not as sexy as nakedness, and nakedness is properly appreciated as a contrast to clothedness, so, therefore, partial clothedness is erotic, and shoes are sexy but don't obscure The Naughty Bits. (Men in sock garters, however—what? I don't get that one.)
But vintage erotica is really the best way to get a good sense of how old-fashioned underwear really worked. I'm completely in love with the idea of wearing such things. And I think it would be so much fun to create characters and settings in different eras…
I know, I know, I'm very weird. Now go on with your life and try to tell yourself you've never been interested in anything totally weird either.
Getting back into skating may be alleviating my troubling grumpiness. Over the last couple of weeks I have been very short-tempered, impatient, easily frustrated and unable to cope with adversity. I think I partly rightly blamed not having a bedroom for this—it made me very upset not to have any space of my own, and it has a corrosive effect on my entire sense of well-being to have my house in such a shambles that I cannot reliably locate any of my possessions, even the ones I need every day. I have a bedroom now, and a dresser, and several boxes under the bed which I can use for the storage of clothing and possessions. Somehow this has calmed me, even though—you guessed it—said dresser is entirely empty, as are said boxes, and said possessions are in as much scattered disarray as ever. But I have a place for them, even if they're not in it.
But I think it's also that I'm regularly getting my ass kicked again. Skating to exhaustion is one thing—I've done a bit of that—but also just being there, interacting with the other girls, and especially the new girls with their enthusiasm and interest in the whole thing. It really does help to refocus one's energy.
Last night we did "fun" drills—Mia gave us relay races to do, an obstacle course, and an endurance skate in the wrong direction. I feel like I got stabbed in the kidney—the muscle on that side simply is not up to the task of raising my outside foot to do an inside crossover. It is strong the other direction, but not this one. And, as Mia intended, it leveled us—the veterans were as shaky on their crossovers as the newbies, without the ingrained advantage of muscle memory, and as many veterans as new girls had to shakily skate to the wall and try to stretch out cramping muscles that would not carry them in this unaccustomed motion.
And this morning, I rose on time, but instead of checking my email for 20 minutes, I went and did the dishes in the sink instead. Normally when I do dishes, I do so seething in annoyance over the fact that I am the only one who ever does dishes or in fact any housework. But somehow this morning, doing the dishes while Z lay in bed only pleased me, because when I was done, the sink was clean. So I made Z a lunch to take to work, and left slightly early for work. (Of course, traffic ate up my early start, but whatever.)
Things aren't bothering me today, even though I'm pretty sure this isn't my life and I'm only pretending it is so I really am not sure what I'm supposed to be doing at the moment—probably not updating LJ…
Am I addicted to exercise???
On another note, I'm considering, with complete seriousness, becoming an affiliate marketer for porn, to subsidize my terrible habit of not wanting to do work that involves leaving the house (since, as I'm seeing vividly played out everywhere, my writing habit, while it may result in publication, will never pay me well or reliably, given the current reprehensible state of the publishing industry, and I have become horribly addicted to eating).
My other idea is doing porn myself. I am increasingly enamored of the idea of doing a whole site of elaborately-staged, very authentic, fake-vintage porn. I need to become a much better seamstress and costumer, of course, but I think it would be great. I was looking at deltaofvenus.com the other day, which is a porn site ingeniously composed entirely of vintage erotica (1850-1960), and thinking that there is nothing new under the sun. The money shot? Well, before the Pill, coitus interruptus was just about the only way to avoid conception. It's not a visual thing at all, it's a practical thing that has become eroticized. And keeping one's shoes/socks on in porn despite being totally naked? Apparently this dates back to prehistory, as far as I can tell, though I still have no idea why it happens, save that nudity is not as sexy as nakedness, and nakedness is properly appreciated as a contrast to clothedness, so, therefore, partial clothedness is erotic, and shoes are sexy but don't obscure The Naughty Bits. (Men in sock garters, however—what? I don't get that one.)
But vintage erotica is really the best way to get a good sense of how old-fashioned underwear really worked. I'm completely in love with the idea of wearing such things. And I think it would be so much fun to create characters and settings in different eras…
I know, I know, I'm very weird. Now go on with your life and try to tell yourself you've never been interested in anything totally weird either.
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no subject
Date: 2007-10-17 02:25 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-10-17 05:39 pm (UTC)Actually, I probably could-- if not one of the roller derby 'sponsors', then one of their friends-- the Buffalo photography community is pretty tight-knit and open-minded.
Alternately I can set up a photo studio in my basement and finally use my awesome camera for something, although Z needs a crash-course in portrait photography first.
But I'm not really that interested just for the porno part of it. Randy from that site I linked to pointed out that the affiliate marketers can make 50% commissions on every conversion. That's a hell of a living, if you're good. Meanwhile Z's system of user-controlled content-- with the for-free, for-pay divide easily individually customized-- is a really interesting way to approaching self-publishing. I could create the hypertext novel I started conceptualizing in college, if I made it interesting enough. What I want to make is something that would only work on the Internet. And would be a lot more interesting than a fat chick getting out her ginormous hooblers.
(However: a thorny issue arises in time-travel porn. I either need to coordinate it so I can do all my historical photoshoots in a sequence while my armpit/leg/etc hair is authentically grown out, or I need to get me a wicked-convincing <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/merkin>merkin.)
At any rate... I still don't know that I understand quite precisely what it is that your company does, exactly. But I think the Internet could do a whole lot more with porn than it already does. That's for darn sure.
And hell, whether I have my own site or not, whether my project takes off, I still could probably stand to do a few photo shoots for other sites and see what the industry's like. I just have to finalize, in my head, the realization that once your boobs are on the Internet, they're permanently on the Internet, and that right there is the same Internet that your dad is totally baffled by when he's searching for information on a specific type of Winchester rifle and suddenly there's naked ladies on his computer screen. (True story. He commented dryly, "None of those girls looked much like old Oliver (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oliver_Winchester).")
no subject
Date: 2007-10-17 03:43 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-10-17 05:28 pm (UTC)Please, I go to my mother for that kind of advice, not my friendslist. ;)
I dunno, I just have to be self-motivated in order to do anything. Right now I'm struggling to put together an email to a dealer, convincing him to order more units to get his shipping cost down. I started it off and halfway through the second sentence wrote, "But I really don't care one way or the other," and it was only as I was rereading it to mentally compose the third sentence that I realized I really couldn't say that.
But I, really, don't really care one way or the other-- I make .5% commission on this, and it's very, very abstract to me. I could paste on a fake smile to earn a bigger tip as a waitress, knowing I'd never see the asshole again after another five minutes or so, but that was $5 in my hand (which I may or may not have to report to the government), not $5 I'd see in two months in a non-itemized check with taxes taken out, and someone I'd have to talk to again so it's not like I could put the whole thing out of my head.
Ug.
Also it's way more boring than having beer flung at your head.
Man I just want to be naked on the Internet. Is that so wrong?
Well, mostly, I just want to do something interesting.
no subject
Date: 2007-10-17 05:33 pm (UTC)Hehehe! I never give that kind of advice, which both why I am and am not a good mother. My father told me not to get a degree in English literature when I was young--that I would never make a decent living. He was right in the most obvious sense, but so wrong.
no subject
Date: 2007-10-17 05:50 pm (UTC)So that there's my role model. Except he's got a full pension from the State because most of his weird random jobs were for them, for 30 years. I'll never get a job with a pension, so I socked away a year's worth of tips and started an IRA, but I'll never be able to put anything else in it, so I'll just hope what I've got in there does well...
Egh. Well, whatever. We'll see. If nothing else, the job I have is teaching me about running a manufacturing business-- I'm wheedling the shipping coordinator into teaching me her job for when she wants a day off, and then I'll know that much more.
My mom is no kind of career advisor-- at the moment, she's quite funny, because she's burned-out on teaching and has 2 years to go until retirement, so she's very down on work in general, and especially down on teaching-- which is a nice relief. But she got to stay home and raise us for a full 10 years.